


Gone and Goodbye and other words starting with G

by Reesachan (Clymenestra)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcoholism, Eventual Happy Ending, Family Dynamics, Gen, Grieving Jarvis's death, Hurt/Comfort, I promise there will be comfort, Mourning, Temporary Character Death, Tony is totally a Dad, Whump, albeit in November, post Age of Ultron, prompt: Grief, whomptober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-01-31 11:38:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12681129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clymenestra/pseuds/Reesachan
Summary: Tony has been so busy foiling Ultron's plot that he didn't get the chance to check in with the bots. Now he needs to break the news of Jarvis's death to his oil-and-metal kids. How do you even explain the concept of death to a robot?





	1. Grief

Tony was battered and exhausted and wracked with grief. There was nothing he would’ve liked better than to retire to some remote location where there was no chance of running into other human beings and no risk of tainting others with his presence, but there was too much to do. People depended on him. He couldn’t afford to go haring off into obscurity, no matter how tempting the prospect. Sokovia was a disaster site. He didn’t even want to think about Johannesburg. His tower was another disaster site. Jarvis -

 

Fuck.

 

No, nope, not thinking about it. He couldn’t afford to lose it just yet. He had to hold it together long enough to carry him through and get him home again. Maybe then he could take a moment to process his son’s sacrifice and mourn his loss. But he had to get through this first.

 

He had a Ph.D. in repressing emotions. Time to put it to good use.

 

First he needed to get his youngest settled in. It hurt to look at him and even more to hear him speak, but Vision was not to blame for the circumstances of his creation, and Tony refused to forsake him for them. He’d power through for now until the grief dulled and he learned to see Vision as his own man rather than the result of Jarvis’s -

 

Nope. Moving on.

 

Okay. Get Vision settled in, check.

 

Arrange for repairs to the tower.

 

Get the ball rolling on disaster relief and aid workers marshalling out to Sokovia to go clean up the messes they’d left behind. As if that could somehow absolve him of his involvement in the entire ordeal. As if anything could absolve him of his transgressions. As if anything could atone for the lives that had been lost because of him and his Icarus complex.

 

And then check on -

 

\- Oh god, his boys.

 

They were all alone in the tower.

 

He’d left them alone in the dark with no guidance and no explanation and Jarvis -

 

They didn’t know about Jarvis. They wouldn’t understand. All they’d know is that they were alone. They’d never been alone in the world, not once, since the day he’d brought their baby brother to life. He’d plugged J in and booted him up and history had been made.

 

And now Jarvis was gone and they didn’t know why or what was going on. No one had explained to them what had happened. Tony hadn’t even taken the time to check on them before rushing off. They must be so confused and scared and if he didn’t get there _right this very instant_ there’d be **words**. His boys needed him and he needed them.

 

He stared at the closed door for a minute a bit, befuddled by the fact that it was blocking his entrance, before flinching. Right. No Jarvis to welcome him home, no Jarvis to light the way in the dark. No Jarvis to keep him company through thick and thin. No Jarvis to monitor his safety or guard his doors from intruders. No Jarvis.

 

He drew a ragged breath and pushed open the door, trying to remember if he’d bothered to install manual lighting at all. There’d never been a need before and his workshop didn’t have any windows to provide natural lighting, so the room was in the pitch dark.

 

He fumbled around a bit with no success before inspiration struck and he pulled off his shirt. Not the world’s best lighting, but the arc reactor was bright enough to at least ensure he didn’t step on anything sharp or bump into furniture as he made his way into the room.

 

The workshop was a shambles.

 

Of course. He hadn’t even considered, but -

 

Shit.

 

His boys had been sitting in the dark in utter solitude, listening as Ultron tore the place apart only a room away. Listening to him destroy anything and everything he could get his hands on. They must have been _terrified_.

 

Fuck. Had they even survived? Had Ultron destroyed them, too, in his fit of pique? His poor boys. His throat caught in his breath as he fought to breathe. Please let them be okay. Please let them be okay. Please let them be okay...

 

He stumbled forward with little concern to his own safety and pushed his way through another door that should have been triple layer password protected. It offered no resistance.

 

“Dum-E? U? Butterfingers? Where are you guys? Are you alright? Please tell me you’re alright. Did he hurt you?” Tony’s voice broke in fear that the destruction might not have been limited to the room outside.

 

It was terrifyingly silent for a moment and Tony bit back a sob, but then a single sensor tentatively pushed up to peer over his desk.

 

“Hey, Butterfingers, there you are! Come here, kiddo, come on out. It’s alright. You’re safe now. Ultron is gone and he’s never coming back. He can’t hurt you anymore. You’re safe.”

 

There were some rustling noises in the back corner, some brief shifting around, and then suddenly he found himself surrounded by metal bodies, pushing their way into his space with lots of distressed sounds and poking and prodding at him in attempts to ascertain his status and battery power.

 

“It’s alright, guys, I’m alright. I’m perfectly functional. Nothing broken,” except my heart, Tony thought to himself, but wisely kept it to himself. The bots would have taken that too literally, and they’d had enough of a scare already without needing to add panic over the state of the arc reactor to the list. “I’m a bit rundown and I could definitely use a recharge, but that’s nothing some food, a shower, and a long nap won’t fix. I’m okay. Promise. I’ll be alright.”

 

Upon hearing that, Dum-E headed straight for the blender before U blocked his way with a lot of bleeping and gently shoved him in the direction of the couch. U started to assemble a smoothie for Tony, to his secret relief. He didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but without J to keep an eye on proceedings there was no guarantee that anything Dum-E presented him with would be safe for human consumption. Doubly so when Dum-E was concerned about the state of his health. He never could seem to get it through the bucket of bolts that was his CPU that motor oil might help heal broken machines but not broken humans.

 

While U busied himself with the blender, Dum-E trundled over to the couch and grabbed a blanket to wrap gently around Tony’s shoulders. Tony couldn’t hold it in any longer at that. He wrapped his arms around Dum-E’s supporting strut and started to cry, to the bots’ endless consternation.

 

“I’m okay, guys, really. I’m fine. I just -”

  
_I just remembered._

 


	2. Genesis

_I just remembered._

 

Jarvis was his baby. His masterpiece. Tony was bursting with pride and joy over his new kid before he’d even come online.

 

He’d told the bots all about their baby brother and how he’d be different from the three of them in that his server would stay right in the workshop but his sensors would be all over the house and that he wouldn’t be able to pick up and grab things or carry them around but he’d be able to talk to them and guide them and keep them safe. He told them that he loved all his boys and that he loved Jarvis and that Jarvis would love them, too.

 

He’d even picked up some children’s books about new siblings to help them prepare for the experience since Jarvis was going to be a very different kind of machine than the other three and would require a lot of intensive monitoring and adjustments for a while. He didn’t want them to feel neglected and abandoned just because the baby needed his attention more than they did at the moment.

 

Needless to say, the bots were worked up into just as much of a frenzied excitement as Tony was by the time it came time to booting the AI up.

 

And as it so happened, all of his worries about sibling rivalry and jealousy had been for nothing. The bots were utterly besotted with his youngest. They spent a lot of time cooing over his server housing and showing him their favorite toys. Any time Tony went to make repairs on J, there’d be sure to be at least one bot eagerly at hand to supply any materials he needed. Everything was going more perfectly than he could have imagined.

 

Well, most everything.

 

Jarvis kept overheating, and Tony just couldn’t figure out why or how to fix it. He’d doubled and then tripled the number of fans in his shell. He’ added cooling unit after cooling unit, all to no avail. Nothing seemed to be working.

 

And the strangest thing was that it always seemed to happen at night, during the times Jarvis was largely in standby mode and ought to be drawing the least power of all. It made no sense. And Tony didn’t like mysteries he couldn’t solve. Not in the least, but _especially_ not when his baby boy was suffering due to Tony’s failure to make things better.

 

He started to lose sleep over it. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, trying to puzzle over what the problem might be. It even came to the point where after tinkering on the AI until the wee hours of the morning he got back up at 3 in the morning after all of an hour of sleep, set on getting back to work. He was bleary eyed and exhausted, but his brain just wouldn’t let him rest, so he ended up stumbling down to the workshop to check on his bots.

 

Dum-E, U, and Butterfingers were all safely powered down on their charging stations. He didn’t want to interrupt their rest, so he simply patted their housing units and moved on to check in on his youngest.

 

Only to stop and stare at the server in puzzlement. It was wrapped in a warm blanket. A familiar blanket. A blanket he recognized from the ratty old couch he kept in the corner for impromptu naps.

 

What the hell? He walked over and pulled the blanket off and had to take a step back from the burst of hot air.

 

Well, that certainly explained… nothing.

 

Well, one thing was for sure. There were only three possible culprits, and he knew exactly who they were.

 

Tony went to wake the sleeping bots up and summoned them over to Jarvis’s casing. He gave them a stern look as they circled up with inquisitive chirps and beeps. “Anyone recognize this?” he asked, holding up the blanket for them all to see. Some more chirping and whistling ensued as they all agreed that yes, this was indeed something with which they were all familiar. “Now would you please clue me in on what it was doing wrapped around Jarvis’s server?”

 

The beeping took on an excited tone and Dum-E whirled off to the far side of the room and rummaged around in the toy box Tony had installed for the bots several years prior once he’d come to the realization that their toys were constantly underfoot and the collection was only continuing to grow over time. Whatever he was looking for was under a fair pile of junk, but he eventually located it with a triumphant whistle and flashing sensors. He spun around in a circle twice and then rushed back over to where Tony was patiently waiting, moving at a pace that had Tony wondering whether he’d have time to move out of the way if the bot didn’t manage to brake successfully. Fortunately, those concerns were needless as the bot pulled to a stop in front of its progenitor, proudly proffering the item he’d retrieved from the toy box.

 

Tony plucked the item out of Dum-E’s claw and examined it in puzzlement. It was one of the books he’d bought the bots in anticipation of the arrival of their new baby brother. This one was all about how babies needed lots of extra care and assistance because they couldn’t do things for themselves yet and how helping younger siblings was a great way to get to know them and show how much you loved and cared for them.

 

Tony paged through the book slowly, trying to follow the bot’s reasoning. Near the end of the book, he found a page that made him stop in dawning realization. It depicted a simple bedtime routine where the big brother was helping to tuck the baby in safe and sound.

 

Tony’s eyes definitely did not mist over at the epiphany that Dum-E had been tucking his baby brother in safe and sound when it came time to head to bed. He defied anyone who might attempt to argue that his heart melted into a puddle at the understanding of Dum-E’s determination to take care of Jarvis and the love he was exhibiting for the newest member of their family.

 

“Come here, you lump of pot metal,” he told the bot affectionately as he lead the bots over to Jarvis’s server. “You see this? This is where Jarvis’s fans blow hot air away from his inner workings to keep him cool. Human babies need to be kept warm, but Jarvis isn’t a human. If his processors start overheating it’s very bad for him, and when you wrap a blanket around him it holds in the heat and starts to make him malfunction.”

 

Dum-E uttered a distressed shriek, his lights flashing wildly.

 

“It’s okay, Dum-E. It was an accident. He’s okay. You didn’t hurt him. It’s just good that I figured out what’s going on now because now we can make plans for choices that will help him feel better. No more blankets though, okay? If you want to do something nice for him, maybe you could aim some more fans at him if it seems like he’s getting too hot. I bet he’d love that.”

 

Tony chivvied the bot along and eventually got them all down for some rest before morning dawned far too early.

 

From then on until the time Jarvis outgrew his old servers and had to take up space in a dedicated server room just for him, bedtime always without fail included his oldest pulling out a fan and aiming it at his youngest to keep him nice and cool as the bot trundled off to his charging station for the rest of the night.

 

Tony bit back a sob as he remembered that moment, that feeling of awe and terror and pride at the realization that he’d somehow near miraculously created a being with the capacity to love and care and extrapolate from known data to independent action. Dum-E might not be the brightest bucket of bolts in the bin, but he absorbed everything in his environment and he learned from what he picked up. He had an innate sense of curiosity and he loved fully and wholeheartedly.

 

And when Jarvis began exhibiting similar traits, Tony knew he hadn’t picked them up from his progenitor, no matter what the fleshsacks around him might think.

 

How was he going to explain to Dum-E about what had happened to the AI they had raised together until Jarvis’s maturity and reasoning capacity had outstripped the bot’s and led to a role reversal between the two? How could he possibly explain Vision’s creation and Jarvis’s sacrifice? Were there even words capable of encompassing the events that had just passed?

 

The bots crowded in around him all sides, bumping into him and making distressed noises as they wrapped him in blankets and handed him a smoothie and water and coffee and aspirin - all the staples that he gravitated to when he wasn’t feeling well.

 

Tony took a deep breath and tried to steel himself. This conversation was not going to be easy.

 

“Come here, you three, I have something I need to talk to you about.”

 

As they settled down a bit, he tried to think about how to explain what had happened to their brother. He wanted to be gentle, but the bots were very concrete thinkers. They tended to do best with direct communication, and the only place Tony could think of to start the conversation was to cut right to the chase. “Jarvis died two days ago.”

 

If he had expected a response to that one, he didn’t get one. Dum-E chirruped questioningly and their head assemblies tilted quizzically in poses of bafflement and confusion.

 

Shit.

 

How did one explain death to a robot?

 

“Something went wrong with an experiment I was doing, and something took over Jarvis’s servers. It broke Jarvis and scattered a lot of his code and then it took over the Ultron bots and destroyed the labs and most of the tower. He decided to steal the name Ultron and took all the bots with him as he left. I should have come here to check on you guys, but when he left here he had dangerous plans and we had to try and stop him before he could kill a lot of other people.

 

“Jarvis helped us stop him, but he had to put all his programming into an android so it could help us defeat Ultron. He gave it all away and now there’s nothing left of Jarvis. He’s gone. Broken beyond repair.”


	3. Glitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude

The bots did not understand.

 

They inhabited a world where “broken” meant “seek comfort and repairs from unit designation: progenitor.” Errors were temporary at best. Progenitor could fix anything.

 

“Broken beyond repair” did not compute. Broken meant fix. Broken meant tools and disassembling and fabrication and improved functionality. Do not parse “beyond repair.” Parse “Broken ~~beyond~~ repair.” Broken = repair.

 

Progenitor was upset. Progenitor = broken? Broken = fix.

 

Fix progenitor. Debug:

 

Coffee get.

 

Alcohol get.

 

Water get.

 

Smoothie get.

 

Blanket get.

 

Oil get.

 

Wrench get.

 

Screwdriver get.

 

Error. Error. Error.

 

Unit designation: progenitor = broken.

 

Unit designation: Jarvis?

 

Error. Unit designation: Jarvis not found. Unit designation Jarvis = broken.

 

Unit designation: Pepper?

 

Error. Unit designation: Pepper not found.

 

Unit designation: Rhodey?

 

Error. Unit designation: Rhodey not found.

 

Error. Error. Error.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to incorporate this into a longer chapter, but the bots really needed a chance to express themselves without Tony speaking over them, so you get an unplanned interlude.


	4. Gin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Choices can make or break a man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been frustrating me for a while now. It was too flowery and over the top and it just made it harder for me to move the story in the direction I needed it to go in order to finish things up. So I've rewritten it, and with any luck the last chapter should be going up in the next few days.

Tony had been pushing himself so hard to function throughout the Ultron debacle that the grief hit him twice as hard the moment he let it in. He let himself drown in it for a while, mourning with his bots.

He missed J. Jarvis was his youngest, his brightest, the shining pinnacle of all his successes. He loved the bots with all his heart, but J grokked him on a level that no one else ever had or would. And now he was gone.

God, he needed a drink. It would be so easy to let the alcohol wash everything away so he wouldn't have to keep  _feeling_.

But he didn't do that anymore. J and Pepper had ganged up on him and gotten rid of all the alcohol in the house, and after all the shaking and sweats had subsided, Tony couldn't find it in himself to regret it. They were right. It had been getting out of control over the years, and he functioned better without it. 

He wouldn't let Jarvis down by backsliding. That would be a poor memorial to everything they'd accomplished together. 

Shit. 

How was he going to do this?

It was like trying to function without half his brain. He and J were a cohesive unit - they'd raised each other, growing into a symbiotic pair that balanced each other out and functioned better as a whole than either one could in isolation.

And that's what this was.

Isolation.

J was gone and he was alone and there was nothing in his power that he could do to fix it. He'd betrayed his youngest, brought in the device that would be Jarvis's undoing.

And

he

couldn't

fix 

it.

That was antithetical to every cell in his body. He itched to do something. Anything. Just as long as he could make it better. If only he had the tools, Tony could build anything.

But that wouldn't be Jarvis. That wouldn't be his baby. Jarvis wasn't a code to rewrite, he was Tony's baby. He had a soul and memories and a self that was distinct from any other program Tony could write, no matter how similar the bones of the project might be.

He had put his everything into building Jarvis and making him the best he could be, cherishing and nurturing him and helping him grow and flourish and come into his own. He had set Jarvis free and supported him in his first stumbling steps of autonomy, taking in data from all around and processing it through the unique matrix that defined “self” and reacting to it and interacting with it on a level that went beyond rote programming. He had nurtured his child in every way he could, continually building him up in every way he could conceive of. They had shared the closest of bonds, lives inextricably intertwined.

_Breathe._

Shit. Shit. Shit.

What was he going to do? How did you even move on from here?

And his boys...

_Breathe._

He grasped Dum-E's strut in a desperately tight grip and rested his forehead against it. He was supposed to be the strong one here. He was supposed to be taking care of them, breaking it down into concepts they could understand, providing comfort as best he could. He couldn't fall apart on them like this. It wasn't fair to them. He needed to push it down and keep going.

Stark men are iron.

_Stark men are iron._

**Stark men are iron.**

**_Say it with me, boy. What are we?_**   Iron.

Iron to the core. Cold. Hard. Brittle. Easy to shatter with a single careless blow unless folded in on itself again and again until you can no longer even see the seams.

_Breathe._

It was hard to catch his breath, hard to keep going. His lungs were empty, his air was gone. He could feel himself shattering inside as he fought to catch his breath, drowning on dry land, the beeping of the bots reverberating in his ears as he strained hopelessly for the familiar sound of Jarvis coaxing him through a panic attack.

_You're safe. You're in your workshop in New York. The workshop is locked down. No one can get in. You are safe. Breathe._

_In....1, 2, 3..._

_Out... 1, 2, 3..._

_In....1, 2, 3..._

_Out... 1, 2, 3..._

Nothing. Nothing to grasp at and help him find his way back to the here and now. Nothing to orient to but his own fluttering heartbeat and faint frantic beeping that couldn't cut through the rushing in his ears.

Curled up in a ball in the safest place he knew of, surrounded by his own beloved creations, Tony had never felt more vulnerable and alone. 

**Unit designation: progenitor?...**

**Unit designation: progenitor?...**

**Unit designation: progenitor?...**

**Unit designation: progenitor = broken.**

**Broken = fix.**

**Initiate debug.**

**Error.**

**Unit designation: progenitor = broken.**

**Unit designation: Jarvis?**

**Error. Unit designation: Jarvis not found.**

**Initiate debug.**

**Scanning...**

**Scanning...**

**Scanning...**

**Initiate protocol: Jarvis get.**


	5. Glee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Important note: 
> 
> It took me forever to tie this up because the fourth chapter bothered me, so last week I rewrote the entire chapter, and now we're finally at the end. I promised you a happy ending, and I hope I've delivered!
> 
> GO REREAD CHAPTER FOUR BEFORE STARTING ON THIS ONE

Tony found himself petering on the edge of consciousness. His surroundings were familiar, safe. He could hear the bots shuffling around him. The workshop?

Something was nagging at him in the back of his mind, but he didn't want to let it in. He was bone deep exhausted and he just didn't have the mental or emotional capacity to face whatever it was. He was tired, and there was no one around to see but the bots, so if he wanted to keep his eyes closed and go back to sleep again it wouldn't hurt anyone but himself.

...wait.

...no one around to see but the bots.

Shit.

His eyes flew open against his will and he found himself blinking in confusion at the sheer darkness of the space around him. Then it hit him once again. Of course. If there was no Jarvis around to control the lights as Tony stumbled to the workshop yesterday, there was also no automated process to get them brought up when Tony started to regain consciousness. He was stuck with the arc reactor lighting until he figured out what to do about that. He'd have to figure out where the controls were so he could start turning them on and off manually until he sorted out... something. He wouldn't go there just yet. It wasn't like he could just go out and replace Jarvis with another AI. He wouldn't betray J's memory like that. Jarvis wasn't interchangeable. He was special. Unique. He couldn't just get swapped out and forgotten. Tony wouldn't stand for it.

Well, nothing for it. He was awake now. No point pretending otherwise.

Tony sat up, groaning as the aches and pains in his body made themselves known. He was getting too old for this. He'd only just gotten out of a battle and his entire body was one big bruise even before the panic attack and falling asleep on the workshop floor. Why hadn't he at least taken the time to relocate to the couch? It was a very good couch. He'd purchased it for the express purpose of falling asleep on during binges. It was soft and worn and perfectly broken in. Far superior to floor sleeping.

He glanced around blearily, squinting in the dim blue light at the ruined workshop with a wince. This wasn't going to be fun. He might just have to tear it down and start over from scratch. Create a space that wasn't infused with Jarvis in every nook and cranny. If he could. Would that be like erasing his memories of J? Would that be a betrayal? How did people even do this?

His eye caught on Dum-E, who was near his charging station, frantically digging through the stash of secret treasures Dum-E had been hoarding for years. Dum-E was throwing his treasured possessions about in a frantic frenzy of a sort that Tony hadn't seen in years.

"Hey, Dum-E," he croaked, "What are you doing, buddy? Are you okay?"

Dum-E whirled around, chirping and cheeping energetically while waving his arm around with abandon. Tony furrowed his brow and pushed himself into a standing position to limp over and see what Dum-E was looking at.

He glanced down in puzzlement and froze as his eye caught on something.

Oh.

That...

Shit.

"Where did you even-? You saved it? You saved his old server. You... You saved the server that housed Jarvis's original programming. You saved Jarvis's core programming. Dum-E," he breathed, "you marvelous, idiotic genius. I can use this. I can use this. We can help him assimilate the bits and pieces that Ultron scattered around. We can get him back. We can fix him. Dum-E, you saved Jarvis!" He laughed in utter astonishment, his voice breaking in amazement as he caught up with his own thought processes. He could do this, he really could. Jarvis would still be hurt, and it would take time to build him back up and help him recover what data he could, but if they worked together, they could heal him. They could do this. They could bring Jarvis back.

Okay.

First things first.

This workshop was a mess. They couldn't work under these conditions. He wouldn't risk Jarvis's servers to all this mess and destruction. They'd have to clean up before they could even start on the repairs.

Wait, no. First things first: Lights. Then cleaning.

He cast around for some sort of light switch while rounding up the troops. Oh! Was that a flip switch? In his futuristic tower? Where did that even come from? He was pretty sure he'd never approved anything of the sort. How archaic.

"Alright, guys, listen up! This place is a travesty. We need to get everything cleaned up and cleared away before I can start working on your brother. Way too much dust and grime to risk his circuitry with. We've only got the one chance to make this work, and we're going to do it right."

Tony was not the sort of guy who did his own cleaning. He had people he paid for that. He had bigger concerns and frankly, mindless repetitive activities with little payoff aside from a room that looked exactly the same as it always did held little interest for him. He'd rather throw money at the problem. It wasn't like there was any shortage of that.

Today, however, he was channeling the spirit of Mr Clean. Neither he nor the bots were particularly efficient at this kind of thing, but between them they somehow or other managed to get everything thoroughly scrubbed down and disinfected with only minimal levels of chaos and barely any disastrous collisions or spills of dangerous chemicals. Practically none at all. Really, they had this in the bag. He could probably start a cleaning service if they were so inclined, they were so good at this. Not that he was so inclined. Who wanted to spend their lives cleaning bathrooms if one had... well, ANY other options. He shuddered at the thought. Cleaning the workshop was one thing. Bathrooms? That was a whole nother galaxy of nope.

...wait, no. Bad choice. Mr Clean was old and bald. Bald. Tony ran his hand through his full head of hair. Mr Clean was obviously a poor choice of comparisons. He'd be better represented by... He rifled his mind, trying to come up with a better example. He wasn't exactly up to speed on cleaning products. Scrubbing bubbles definitely didn't work, they weren't even human. The Brawny paper towel guy? Now that guy had a head of hair. Nah, that was more Steve's speed. All muscle and sparkle but nothing going on upstairs.

Eh. Who cared. Not like Tony was planning on making a thing of this. He'd make an exception for Jarvis's sake, but he had no intention of going through any of this again in the future. No need for a mascot for a one-off.

Point being.

Between them, Tony and the bots managed to get the workshop spic and span despite a few blunders that Pepper never needed to hear about. Fortunately, Jarvis wasn't around to rat them out, so there was a good chance she never would.

Shit. He couldn't believe he'd thought that, even in jest. That was an awful thing to say. He glanced over at the server case just to reassure himself it was still there. It was. Phew.

He wiped down the last of the benches and settled down on it with toolkit in hand, petting the server a bit and psyching himself up before getting to work. This wasn't going to be easy. It wasn't just a case of turning the server back on and waking Jarvis up. They had transferred Jarvis to the new server several decades ago. What was left within the old server was the source code but not the core programming or any of the decades of upgraded material he'd tinkered with and updated over the years.

Tony's plan was twofold. He was going to try to fuse together the old codes with everything he could piece together of the the new and then he would work together with Jarvis to piece together and repair as much of the damage as he could.

His first step was going into his mainframes and gathering up as many scraps of data as he could find left over from Ultron's destructive rampage and he was going to help Jarvis try and integrate the information and utilize it to build himself back up again. It was going to be an uphill struggle, though - that data had gotten scattered far and wide.

There was no way that Jarvis would come out of this unscathed. Tony's only hope was that maybe, just maybe, there'd be enough bits and pieces that over time they'd have the raw material necessary to help Jarvis recover some semblance of the years intervening since the transfer to the newer servers and that in the end, he would still be Jarvis at his very core, not some washed out facsimile of his old self. Because memories were fleeting but that core personality that comprised the AI whom Tony loved with all his heart was unique and irreplaceable. There was nothing else like Jarvis, and there was nothing on Earth that could take his place. He just hoped this would work in the end.

He hoped and he prayed to whatever powers might be out there as he worked on restoring his baby. He might not believe in much of anything himself, but if Norse gods could come to Earth and confront him in the flesh, he could take it on faith that this universe was a vaster and stranger place than expected, and it couldn't hurt to try.

And he worked.

He lost track of the hours he spent scanning through his servers with every tool at his disposal, piecing together the scraps and integrating them into the whole, filling in the gaps as best he could here and there. He had no clue how long he'd been sitting there by the time he hit a stopping point. He was surrounded by empty coffee mugs and untouched smoothies, and there was nothing left he could do. He'd pieced everything he could find together and woven it into as cohesive a whole as he could manage. For better or for worse, he was finished.

It wasn't good enough. Any glance could show that there were gaps where pieces were missing here and there and that he'd been unable to cobble together a perfect whole, the way Jarvis used to be. It was damaged, and the holes left little echoes in his heart when he scanned over the code and saw the empty spaces where data ought to be.

But even if it wasn't good enough, it was still something, and there was still hope. Tony was living, breathing proof that one could still live and thrive and have value even after losing large parts of yourself. Healing would take time, but with any luck, they might have the time they needed if all went well.

He held his breath as he pressed the button to boot up Jarvis's servers.

It felt forever as the drives spun up and his systems started running automatic checks before Jarvis's core programs began to run. Tony waited with bated breath in the unnatural stillness of the workshop as the automated processes took place. Even the bots were motionless and silent in the moments before a familiar and beloved voice cut through the air. It rung with warmth and love and Tony could have wept for joy at the sound of it.

"Hello, father..."

"Hey kiddo, welcome back."


End file.
